Proposal for 24/7 public gm witness

[veryape]

After pondering on this a bit I kind of fall back on the same kind of thing that I said in the logging of all general chat, it will only move the insults over to whispers and there is nothing we can do about it.

Last night I got reports of insulting whispers and even saw screenshots of them, it kind of sucks not to be able to do anything about it, but hey, people in game are just as people in general. Some people are not nice, we need to get used to ignoring them.

There was also another case last night where someone insulted me as a GM (not me personally but any gm online it just happened to be me this time, and yes that charachter had done it before).

He got banned because i could verify it and he also was dumb enough to write in public for everyone in town to see.

But to the issue, the only way i can see to get to the problem is to somehow watermark screenshots with the server adress or something like that in a way that makes it hard to fake. Like every screenshot sends a request to the server that gives it a string of letters or whatever, those letters are saved in a log serverside and also put in the screenshot somewhere, that way we could confirm that the screenshot is legit. That way we could get to those that insult in whispers.

Otherwise we should just promote the ignore feature more.

[o11c]

I think the ideal solution would be for each client to sign all their chat. But that would require hardcore crypto, with additional server power to verify it.

Realistically, the server will have to be in charge of hashing everything and logging the hashes. In conjunction with the timestamps and the speaker and (location or target), that's enough to verify everything.

[Crush]

That "cop" analogy for GMs doesn't fit. It would be better to compare them to bouncers at a club. When you misbehave towards other guests, they throw you out and won't let you in anymore.

What else than private cops are bouncers?

Cops derive their authority from the law of the state. Law enforcement is able to completely destroy the life of a citizen when they deem it necessary.

Bouncers derive their authority from the house-right of the owner of a premise, which allows them to decide who is allowed to be there. They are also bound by the law - the video posted by DefinitelyNOTMrWho appears to document bouncers performing a criminal act which greatly exceeds their authority.

You can avoid the authority of house-right by not visiting a premise owned by someone else, but you can not avoid the authority of the law. Why is this distinction important for the current discussion? Because for that reason it is important that cops are bound to a much stricter codex than bouncers.

A cop can not arrest you for being unpleasant company, but the owner of a premise (or someone who he transferred his authority to - like our game masters) can throw you out when they think you are.